Sunday, September 01, 2013

Where the drive turns left keep ahead on a narrow footpath which leads to Cowan Bridge on the busy A65.
Before continuing the walk the cottages to the left are of some interest.
These once housed the Clergy Daughters’ School attended by Charlotte Brontë and her sisters Emily, Maria and Elizabeth. Conditions were so dire that typhus broke out killing Maria and Elizabeth and no doubt compromising the health of Charlotte and Emily. There is commemorative plaque on the wall.

"These are the choices you make," says Atwood. "Do what you want. If you don't want to have children, don't have them; if you do want to have them, have them. There's going to be consequences either way." She gives it a moment's thought. "I mean poor old Charlotte Brontë possibly shouldn't have had children because it killed her, but Emily didn't and she died anyway. Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space." (Emma Brockes)

Mark Edmundson has defined the Gothic mode as “the art of haunting” whose aim is to show that “life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed.” Oates is working right in the center of this tradition, for “Evil Eye’’ is both possessed by Gothic — echoing iconic stories from “Rappaccini’s Daughter” to “Jane Eyre,’’ recapitulating tropes from innocent virgins to poisonous kisses — and in firm possession of the conventions it deploys with confidence and knowing wit. Past sins, traumas, and tragedies exert an unwavering pull over present actions. (Priscilla Gilman)

The house was built in the 1860s. You walk up from the garden gate through a tunnel of escallonia before you see it properly. Margaret Fay Shaw, in her memoir From The Alleghenies To The Hebrides recalled the first time she saw the house, in August, 1938: “It had a melancholy air, as though the home of sick Brontës.” It has been uninhabited since her death (Campbell having predeceased her in 1996) yet its atmosphere now is anything but melancholy. (Peter Ross)

It reminded me, in its flip-flopping between the real and imagined states, of Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went to Woolworths, but without the frivolity of the earlier work.
I entered into both books with a lot of expectations. Unfortunately, not all of them were quite met. (Nirupa Subramanyan)

The Shillong Times reviews a student production of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Maghalaya (India):

Students of the English department of St. Edmund’s College recently staged an adaptation of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An impeccable display of profundity was in store with a professionally acceptable script written by Nirupam Keshav Sinha and a play unfolding at a smooth pace under the direction of Paul Fernandes, both students of the college.
The incident of the “Madwoman in the attic” is probably the most famous in Jane Eyre, and it has given rise to innumerable interpretations and symbolic readings. (...)
Fernandes was able to do justice to the play in retaining the madwoman in the attic as a powerful motif in literature, particularly in women’s fiction. The adaptation succeeded in expressing the frustration women have felt at the limitations imposed on them by their societies. Fenced in by society, raging against such constriction yet helpless to do much about it, women writers have expressed their anger through the image of the madwoman in the attic. (Nawaz Yasin Islam)

You've said that your newest book, Black Spring, was inspired by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. When did you first read Wuthering Heights? Have Heathcliff and Cathy haunted you ever since, putting the idea for this story in the back of your mind?
I read Wuthering Heights in my early 20s, I think. I found it a hard book at first (as with some of my favourite books) - it took me a few goes - and then, of course, I couldn't put it down. I read Emily Brontë's poems much earlier, when I was a child, and those were as important in the feel of the book as Wuthering Heights itself. I’ve always wanted to write a tragic Gothic romance, I think. I like that extremity and rawness.

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Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.
~ Villette (ch. XXXVIII) by Charlotte Brontë

'The Dissolution of Percy' - in Salford
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*Caroline Lamb writes:*
A rehearsed reading of a work entitled *The Dissolution of Percy *is
planned for the Kings Arms Theatre in Salford, Manchester, for ...